Chapter 100: Oh, Baby

If you are a superstar, you can get a little special treatment. Sky and Molliana’s OB/GYN was a woman named Doctor Beverly Fleming. She was older and one of her claims to fame was that she’d delivered 5,000 babies in Sarasota. Sky and Molliana checked into the hospital the day before their due date July 20. They’d both felt twinges that the doctor called pre-labor throbbing.

The two expectant mothers were in the same room. They also told the nurses that if any of the hospital staff wanted to meet them before they got into serious labor that they were up for it. A cavalcade of nurses and more than a few doctors came in to wish them well. Most had their picture taken with the two stars.

I’d spent some time with the two women attending child birthing classes. Thus, I was also in the same hospital room with the two women alternately massaging tummies and backs, and keeping things calm.

Sky got up to go to the bathroom early the morning of July 20, and her water promptly broke, leaving her standing there in a nightie wet from the crotch down in a pretty large pool of amniotic fluid.

She said, “I guess that what woke me up wasn’t the need to pee again, but a labor pain.” She started to have an occasional pain, but nothing too major or too regular.

Perhaps it was in sympathy, but Molliana’s water broke two hours later. She was also having an occasional labor pain.

Dr. Fleming came in and checked both women. She said that they’d just started to dilate. The cervix of each woman had effaced. She said that the nurse would keep an eye on her and keep her informed. She went off to do other things that OB/GYN doctors do.

The head nurse on the floor suggested that I get into the hospital scrubs that they had provided, and also that I wash up more than I already had to be in that part of the hospital. I did that and then rubbed some more backs. While Sky and Molliana each had some mild pain, there was nothing serious.

That changed for Sky around about ten a.m. We were sitting and talking about the nurseries that we’d set up for the infants, when Sky winced really hard. She said in a loud tone, “HOLY FUCK THAT HURTS.” Her labor had shifted into a higher gear.

One of the nurses strolled in, just as a second jolt of labor rifled through Sky’s small frame. Sky swore again and then apologized. The nurse laughed and then checked her vagina.

The nurse announced, “I think were about half-way there – around five or six centimeters. I’ll let Dr. Fleming know.” She left the room and came back in ten minutes. Sky had had three more hard jolts in that time. The nurse looked surprised and checked her again. She looked at me, and said, “Don’t let her push.” She raced out of the room.

Less than a minute later, two nurses and an orderly came into the room. Between labor pains they shifted Sky to different bed or gurney. She was wheeled away. I didn’t know whether to stay or go.

Molliana had that look as the bed left the room that said, “Hey, what about me?” I went and kissed her forehead.

Moll said, “Go and see what’s happening. Watch your son be born. Go! I’ll see you again real soon, I’m sure.”

I followed the crew with the gurney into one of the delivery rooms. The nurse was checking Sky’s vagina again. She said, “Yep, getting close now. You are opening up really quickly. You’re open about the diameter of an orange slice. Once you are bagel size or about ten centimeters, we’re going to see about having your baby come and stay with us.”

Sky’s labor pains were every two or three minutes. I was feeding her ice and rubbing her back between pains. She was teaching the hospital staff a vocabulary that would make sailors blush. They smiled and assured us that they’d heard it all before – almost every day since they started in obstetrics.

I got to touch the top of my son’s head as he started to emerge through the birth canal and was crowning. Sky’s lower body had stretched her apart and about two inches of the top of the baby’s head showed.

Dr. Fleming arrived about then and conferred with the nurses. She talked to Sky, and then some serious pain, and lots of pushing and swearing commenced. Sky had turned down the idea of an epidural in favor of all-natural child birth. Noah Rice was born at 2:32 p.m. that afternoon.

While all that was going, and as we’d arranged with the hospital and Dr. Fleming, Molliana was wheeled into the same operating room. Her labor pains were also progressing. She wasn’t as noisy or crude about each pain. She did watch as Noah was birthed.

As Sky’s attention shifted to Noah, I turned my attention to Molliana. It took her longer to dilate, but eventually she wanted to push the baby out, and push she did. After touching the baby as she crowned, I went back to helping Moll with the pain and with hydration.

Olivia Rice was born at 5:12 p.m. that afternoon. Moll was exhausted. So was Sky, but she hung in there holding Noah and watching as our lover also birthed.

Thus, we had brother and sister, ignoring the word ‘half’, born on the same day. I noted that Logan’s birthday was also in July on the sixteenth. He just turned five years old.

Sky and Noah, and Molliana and Olivia returned to the house two days later. Everybody had been thoroughly checked out by the doctors. At their request, we kept any kind of celebration very modest.

We did have some extra decorations of pink and baby blue around the house, and the announcement balloons still floated around tethered to our mailbox. That evening just about everybody in the Family made a pilgrimage to the house to see the infants. Although I was the proud father of each child, I didn’t think they looked like anything special – small wrinkly and occasionally noisy, and often smelly.

We stopped having sex when Sky and Moll were around. We didn’t want to tease them. They were on the ‘No-No’ list for six weeks or more. Both women had stitches where they’d had episiotomies to facilitate the deliveries and prevent rupture of the vaginal tissues near the opening.

Various flower arrangements and balloons started to arrive at the house the day after the deliveries. Pretty soon, the place started to smell like the inside of a florist’s shop.

Nursing had commenced and each mother could often be found sitting with either Noah or Olivia hanging off of one her teats. Moll and Sky were swapping babies back and forth to get their child use to having a varied diet and to feel the warmth and cuddles from another mother.

A week after the deliveries, a photographer and reporter from People magazine showed up and spent three hours with Molliana and Sky. Molly and Alice, the singers’ publicists, had arranged the visits with the women. A feature piece was prepared and published a week later. The two superstars were on the cover holding their babies and looking very motherish.

I finally got to have lunch with Mandy almost a week after she’d returned from her self-imposed absence to Canada. The pretty anthropologist and I had lunch at the student union. Campus was pretty empty, but the union was still open during midday.

After sitting and talking about the weather, I dove in with both feet. “Mandy, I love you and everyone in the Family does, too. We don’t want you to be doing anything that you are uncomfortable with. If we’ve already violated you in some way, please accept our profound apologies and let us try to make it right with you.”

Mandy waved her hand in front of her as though to bat an imaginary bug away. “No, no. It’s in the past, and so are my crazy feelings.”

“You felt overwhelmed with the sex?”

She chuckled, “Strange for an anthropologist, right? Yes, that was the fundamental issue. I was in a huge approach-avoidance conundrum. I’d never been in a ‘free love’ environment before. I’d read about it in one of my courses, but being in the midst of it was much different.

“Please don’t laugh at me, but I imprinted on you and Dean around campus here and then at the dinners and social times you had me to. But then I got to stay for one of the Family orgies. I watched the two of you fuck other women. I was shocked, as though I’d been cheated on.

“And then I fucked about seven other men that night. I knew you and Dean before that night, but not all the others. Even those others that I met, I only knew superficially. I had a ‘third-date rule’ that I threw out the window. I wanted to fuck and fuck and fuck, and it felt so good. Great, even. Every man gave me multiple orgasms. I was instantly addicted to whatever was going on.

“Late in the evening, after I was told the men needed some additional time to recover, I was there when some of the other women started to eat the cum they’d recently received from each other’s pussies. I suppressed my feeling that this was gross and watched, and I saw some really sexy and arousing things going on.

“And then, Karen was eating the loads of cum that I’d received from my drippy cunt. And then, I was doing her. I’d never had a gay bone in my body. I was not attracted to other women except as friends. This was different. This was far more than arousal; this was very active participation in sexual activities with part of society that I’d been told to stay far away from. I wasn’t only not staying away; I was deeply immersed in the torrid sex in every way possible.

I awoke the next day back in my apartment and I guess you could say that I went into shock. I remember staring at myself in a mirror and wondering what had happened to the girl that I’d known for over thirty years. She’d vanished and left a bisexual lesbian slut in her place. I started running away from myself that day.”

I reached across the table and held Mandy’s hand. “I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to say other than you should have come and talked to us.”

“I’d had an offer to teach at McGill in Montreal as a guest professor for a year. I don’t like cold weather, but I called up on Monday morning and told them I wanted the post. After that I avoided campus so that I wouldn’t run into you or Dean. I hung around town to finish my classes here and then as soon as I was free, I drove north.”

“And, what did you do?”

“After getting my feet on the ground up there, I found a therapist. I went twice a week over last summer, and then once a week through the winter until about three months ago when I realized that I no longer needed that support.”

“But you participated with us last Saturday night. You and I even made love and you slept with me part of the night.”

“Jim, I do still love you and I could tell that you love me. While I was away, I learned a helluva lot about Amanda Hutchins, and I changed. I discarded a lot of boundaries and barriers that weren’t working for me. I also forgave myself for my indiscretions, and then, after further study, I realized that all those things that happened weren’t indiscretions at all. They were simply choices that I made based on a new value system that I was moving to embrace.”

“You mean the values of the Extended Family?”

“Yes, but it took me four months to reach that conclusion and then start to articulate what I was leaving and what I was moving towards.”

“Heterosexual couples-only monogamy. Fixed boundaries and roles in a relationship loaded with possessiveness and exclusivity. Judgments, jealousy, and conditional love.” I tried to sound pretty blunt.

Mandy nodded, “Yes. All of that. Through the journey inside my head I could remember a conversation we had and you’d quoted somebody, ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’.

“Hamlet,” I filled in.

Mandy went on, “I wrote those words on a big flip-chart and hung it in my living room. I repeated that phrase dozens of times a day. Eventually, I could see that my squeamish feelings were all my own making.

“I’d take one of my concerns, say my sluttish behavior, and I’d recast it in a positive light. I liked the men and the sex was a great way to express my desires and my feelings. I liked the sex a lot, even separate from the men. The orgy was highly arousing and no one was hurt or coerced. Everything was better than masturbation. We weren’t drunk or drugged. The men told me that I was lovely and they wanted more of a relationship with me. On and on.

“I studied the negative judgments, too. Fucking multiple men I didn’t know well was a sin and I was degenerate hedonist. Sex is not a good way to express yourself – to strangers especially. Sexual arousal is a bad thing. The men were telling me compliments because they wanted to fuck me. All the relationships would turn out to be transactional and not long-term.

“My therapist helped me see that most of the negative feelings were messages that I’d internalized from society and the positive components were expressions from inside myself.”

Mandy shook her head and I could see tears in her eyes. “I fucking let society and my fucking church ruin my life for nearly a year. I didn’t like that at all.

“I started to ask myself questions that I’d ponder for days at a time. Why not make love to ten men over a week? Why not seek out sexual arousal? Why not love women as well as men? I went on and on, and in every case, I started to come down on the side of the issue that I’d been avoiding all the time. Of course, I vacillated a lot at first.

“My telling you this makes it sound like it all happened almost overnight. It didn’t. Some of the small leaps took over a month or two, especially when I just started my therapy.”

I cautiously asked, “So, where does that leave you?”

“The bottom-line is that I want to belong to the Extended Family. I want to be one of your lovers and hope you’ll be one of mine. I am bisexual and love to make love to both men and women. I want to have relationships with every single person in the Family – young and old, old and new, men and women. If, after some time, we find that we’re not a fit, I promise that I will move along to some other unique relationship situation.”

“Unique relationship situation?” I asked.

Mandy nodded, “Yes, I discovered that I don’t like the current status quo in society. I need something different. The Family can provide that for me. If not, I’ll have to discover it in some other way.”

I sat back, “You don’t need my vote. You’ve always had it. It’s not a vote anyway. Just hang-out with us, and do me a favor, please share as much of your deliberations as you can with Remington. You’re very articulate about what you went through, and he’s also struggling, perhaps with some of the same issues and concerns.”